Looks like this week is going to be spent on (un)conferences. After my post
on CloudCamp Seattle yesterday, I am going to do a post on day 1
of Demo Conference today. It is not a complete coverage of the conference but a
list of some of my favorite products launched on Day 1. Just for clarification,
I want to highlight the fact that I am not attending Demo Conference in person.
Rather, I am participating virtually by watching their live video stream and by
joining their facebook conference back channel.

This year’s Demo conference started off with Chris Shipley’s announcement
about passing over the mantle to Matt Marshall of Venture Beat. This was
followed with product launch where many products were launched. Then, there were
panel discussions on topics like venture funding and social entrepreneurship.

Some of the products were really old fashioned. Who wants a plugin for
Outlook in this Cloud based era? I do agree that the features in that product
may be useful to many Outlook users. But, I feel that such products have limited
shelf life when people are moving to Cloud based email providers. Many of these
functionalities can be implemented by the Cloud based email vendors or through
browser plugins easily. I was, in fact, disappointed with some of the products
launched yesterday. However, there were also some really cool products that
caught my imagination. In this post, I will briefly discuss them.

Props to:

BitGravity for the release of HD based web broadcasting. It is called BG
Live and it offers HD streams in 720p, and 1080p at 30 frames per second.
Though it is not path breaking in terms of a new idea, their technology is
really intriguing and the HD videos were streamed live without any observable
lag. Now businesses can offer HD videos at the cost of half of the existing
industry rate.

7 Billion People for the release of Web Legend software.
Again, there is nothing path breaking here but I love the idea of how every
retail site can be personalized on the fly based on the user’s browsing habits
and interests. It uses AJAX injection techniques and Neural Networks algorithms
to offer a deep personalization for each and every user. It appears their
customers are seeing a 50% increase in the conversion rates.

eFormic Ltd. for their CO2
Code Initiative. I liked their idea the most because it uses innovative
market based solutions to combat global warming. They enable companies to buy
CO2 certificates which can be used to finance organizations that create
renewable energy sources or participate in planting trees to combat global
warming. Consumers who buy the products from these companies can find unique CO2
codes which they can redeem at their website and select the project they want to support. Well,
human beings are usually lazy and many don’t redeem their CO2 codes. For such
people, their system automatically selects a project after a certain period of
time and the contribution is offered to them. The best part of this whole
initiative is that it is extremely cheap for companies to neutralize their CO2
usage.

Asurion Mobile Applications for the release of their new product called Asurion
Mobile Addressbook. After CO2 Code Initiative, this is the application that
impressed me the most. They convert the telephone addressbook into a platform
based on Open Formats. They allow third party developers to build applications
on top of this addressbook platform. You can add social network and other
information to your addressbook contacts. You could IM or play games with your
contacts from within the addressbook itself. It also integrates third party
services as Smart Contacts so that they are much more relevant to users and are
easy to use. For example, a smart contact like starbucks will find the nearest
locations from where you are and offer an easy way to contact them or show a map
giving directions to that location.

Well, there were also some useful but not so great apps launched on the first
day. Ontier Inc. launched Pixetell, an interesting collaboration software but I
didn’t like the back and forth nature of the communication workflow. A sophisticated clone of I Love Sandy, called CCBetty, was
launched. It is an useful app but nothing new or imaginative. Citrix Online
launched a screen capture app called Goview. It may end up decimating Jing Project but nothing new
here too. One aspect of this app, which I liked, is the near instantaneous
processing and upload to their servers and the immediate availability of the
screencast for viewing. There were many other apps including Mortgage Account
apps and Iphone apps. They were all good apps but nothing of interest to me. I
will be following Day 2 of Demo ‘09 too. I will offer my picks tomorrow.

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.